[freehaven-dev] Paper on inference and "recommender systems"

[<dmolnar@belegost.mit.edu>]

When being Weak is Brave: Privacy in Recommender Systems

Authors: Naren Ramakrishnan, Benjamin J. Keller, Batul J. Mirza, Ananth Y.
Grama, George Karypis

     We explore the conflict between personalization and privacy that
arises from the existence of weak ties. A weak tie is an unexpected
connection that provides serendipitous recommendations. However,
information about weak ties could be used in conjunction with other
sources of data to uncover identities and reveal other personal
information. In this article, we use a graph-theoretic model to study the
benefit and risk from weak ties.  

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/cs.CG/0105028